/lit/ - Literature

Which books will help me with deep introspection and individuation? Should I just read everything by Jung?

start with the egyptians and mesopotamians then the greeks then the latins then the greeks again
unironically also the best

I who went down to the grave
have returned to the “Gate of Sunrise.”
In the “Gate of Prosperity” prosperity was given me.
In the “Gate of the Guardian Spirit”
a guardian spirit drew nigh to me.
In the “Gate of Well-being” I beheld well-being.
In the “Gate of Life” I was granted life.
In the “Gate of Sunrise” I was reckoned among the living.
In the “Gate of Splendid Wonderment”
my signs were plain to see.
In the “Gate of Release from Guilt”
I was released from my bond.
In the “Gate of Praise” my mouth made inquiry.
In the “Gate of Release from Sighing” my sighs were released.
In the “Gate of Pure Water”
I was sprinkled with purifying water.
In the “Gate of Conciliation” I appeared with Marduk,
In the “Gate of Joy” I kissed the foot of Sarpanitum.

>>16635758
Simply because I want

>>16600375
“And because he is served with all the attentions due a god by a lover
who is not pretending otherwise but is truly in the throes of love, and
because he is by nature disposed to be a friend of the man who is serving
him (even if he has already been set against love by schoolfriends or others
who say that it is shameful to associate with a lover, and initially rejects
the lover in consequence), as time goes forward he is brought by his
b ripening age and a sense of what must be to a point where he lets the
man spend time with him. It is a decree of fate, you see, that bad is never
friends with bad, while good cannot fail to be friends with good. Now
that he allows his lover to talk and spend time with him, and the man’s
good will is close at hand, the boy is amazed by it as he realizes that all
the friendship he has from his other friends and relatives put together is
nothing compared to that of this friend who is inspired by a god.
“After the lover has spent some time doing this, staying near the boy
(and even touching him during sports and on other occasions), then the
c spring that feeds the stream Zeus named ‘Desire’ when he was in love
with Ganymede begins to flow mightily in the lover and is partly absorbed
by him, and when he is filled it overflows and runs away outside him.
Think how a breeze or an echo bounces back from a smooth solid object
to its source; that is how the stream of beauty goes back to the beautiful
boy and sets him aflutter. It enters through his eyes, which are its natural
d route to the soul; there it waters the passages for the wings, starts the
wings growing, and fills the soul of the loved one with love in return.
Then the boy is in love, but has no idea what he loves. He does not
understand, and cannot explain, what has happened to him. It is as if he
had caught an eye disease from someone else, but could not identify the
cause; he does not realize that he is seeing himself in the lover as in a
mirror. So when the lover is near, the boy’s pain is relieved just as the
lover’s is, and when they are apart he yearns as much as he is yearned
e for, because he has a mirror image of love in him—‘backlove’—though
he neither speaks nor thinks of it as love, but as friendship. Still, his desire
is nearly the same as the lover’s, though weaker: he wants to see, touch,
kiss, and lie down with him; and of course, as you might expect, he acts
on these desires soon after they occur.

>>16585792
Evolution, aka cross-generational competition, is nature's search for the Beauty of the Golden Age.

>>16561453
>When he writes, it’s likely he will sow gardens of letters for the sake of amusing himself, storing up reminders for himself “when he reaches forgetful old age” and for everyone who wants to follow in his footsteps, and will enjoy seeing them sweetly blooming.

>>16446334
>step outside of myself and see who I am
That's what LSD and shrooms are for.

>>16411430
“Try to pay attention to me,” she said, “as best you can. You see, the
man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld
beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal
of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully
beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors:
“First, it always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither
waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way,
nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation to
one thing and ugly in relation to another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly
there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for
others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands
or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one
idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in
an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself
with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share
in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away,
this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.
So when someone rises by these stages, through loving boys correctly, and
begins to see this beauty, he has almost grasped his goal. This is what it
is to go aright, OR be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes
always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful
things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from
two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs,
and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he
arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty,
so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.

>>16392050
A fortiori, then, that which is not yet one is unknowable, for Plato correctly says that it is impossible to say that one knows, and that one knows nothing.32 Now if the limit of the knowable is the One, we can know nothing beyond the One, a fact that renders these remarks of ours a meaningless rhapsody. But no, for in knowing the objects that we know, we know this as well, namely, that they are unworthy, if we may put it this way, of the primary postulate. Even so, even if we do not yet know the intelligible forms, we judge the images of the forms that are available in us as unworthy of the indivisible, eternal nature of those ideas, since these [conceptions] in us prove to be divisible and largely unstable. And again with still greater force, even if we lack knowledge concerning the totality of forms and kinds, having instead a [mere] image of that totality, an image which consists in the totality of the kinds and forms that are in us in a divided state, we speculate that Being is like the image, but Being is not like the image, but superior, and something supremely unified. And again, we try to conceive of the One, not grasping it through contracting [our minds] but by simplifying all things and resolving them into that; and in us this kind of simplification subsists in relation to all the things in us, but it falls far short of touching on that perfect simplicity. (I 21) For the One in us, or the simple, is least of all that which is expressed by these words, except insofar as speech can be a SIGNPOST for that nature.

might have gone overboard again with the hymns
here's some exegesis, I
>In his commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades, Proclus might refer to a scene in which Apollo attempts to dissuade Dionysus from leaving the throne of Zeus. He says that “Orpheus sets the Apollonian monad over king Dionysus, deterring him from proceeding toward the multitude of the Titans and from rising up from his royal throne, and guarding him undefiled in a state of unity.”143 The Neoplatonists equate Apollo with Helios: in Platonic Theology, Proclus claims that Orpheus and Plato consider Helios to be “the same as Apollo.”144 Damascius in his Phaedo commentary says of Helios that “while in his quality of Dionysus he is divided over the world, but as Apollo he holds an intermediate position, gathering the dividedness of Dionysus and standing by the side of Zeus.”145 Therefore, Apollo-Helios represents the power of unification by which the lower levels of the Neoplatonic universe revert back to the One.
>SOCRATES: So let us pray to the gods for assistance when we perform our mixture, Protarchus, whether it be Dionysus or Hephaestus or any other deity who is in charge of presiding over such mixtures.
PROTARCHUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: We stand like cup-bearers before the fountains—the fountain of pleasure, comparable to honey, and the sobering fountain of intelligence, free of wine, like sober, healthy water—and we have to see how to make a perfect mixture of the two.
>when all things become clear
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Hail to you, my father, and to the Companions in your beautiful field, Lord of those who give to him who defies your putrefaction in it. Its light is in the sky as your soul, and RE stands up in the midst of the sky in order to give guidance to his attendants. His back, even Re-Atum's, is turned to the smells; a lock of hair is cut off, and the eye is closed because of the eye which this pellet in its socket sealed. May the fledgeling which issued from you live, may the tip of a fingernail be covered, may a fly fly up, may Osiris live, may the great ones, the Celestial Kine, be gathered together. I am a builder and I have knowledge; I am a builder and I raise up my father; I have built up the Great One and the Great Lady, I have built up the sea and the flood, I am this defiant one of Khnum who takes away enmity. This is the builder who cuts off . . . I have come that I may see Osiris, and I will live beside him and putrefy beside him, I am your semblance, I am the image of you.

GUIDE TO THE DOUBLE DOORS OF THE HORIZON WHEN THEY CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF THE GODS. THIS IS THE NAME OF THEIR KEEPERS WHICH IS IN WRITING AND THIS IS THEIR ENTIRE NATURE. AS FOR ANYONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THEY SPEAK, HE SHALL FALL INTO THE NETS OF THOSE WHO NET THERE HAVE BEEN WRITTEN. As FOR ANYONE WHO SHALL KNOW WHAT THEY SPEAK, HE SHALL PASS BY, AND HE SHALL SIT BESIDE THE GREAT GOD WHEREVER HE MAY BE, AND HE SHALL GIVE RESPECT TO HIM, FOR HE IS ONE WHOLLY EQUIPPED AND SPIRITUALIZED. AS FOR A MAN WHO SHALL KNOW, HE WILL NEVER PERISH, AND THEIR SEAL SHALL BE ON HIM LIKE ANY GOD FOR WHOM THEY DO IT AMONG ALL THE GODS.

>>16105513
Therefore, we speak of the triad in that realm, in the sense that it signifies an undifferentiated multiplicity, and again the dyad signifies the cause of that multiplicity, and the monad is related to these as the One itself, as that which is beyond this very multiplicity. And this is the celebrated intelligible triad, which, wishing to explain by means of different configurations, we are unaware that we render it more complex in our accounts, and especially when we make it an ennead, reckoning it as the complete leader of all things from the first until the lowest, observing it as if in a mirror, and seeing it in the third, since it is by nature trimorph, and seeing the triadic principles before it that appear to illuminate brilliantly its three ubiquitous forms, as if in a cloud that has three reflecting surfaces, the single color of the sun appears as an apparently polychrome rainbow. And so also Socrates in the Philebus >>16105470 was unable to gaze in the face of that One, and clarified its nature by means of the triad stationed at its threshold, as he says, because he caught a glimpse of that triad quivering with the single ray of the henad, in a completely unified vision.
In sum, as with other things, so with the triad, we return to that realm through indication. And as the first principle is a monad, and the second is the indefinite dyad, and the third is a triad, because the triad is contemplated through reversion, the dyad through procession, and the monad through remaining, so too the entire triad that is composed of these could NOT be from Three Monads {oy vey Maximus where did you get that statement from most curious}, it seems, but because it is a Single Unity that is perfect, the same unity Remains and Proceeds and Reverts, nor are these three different things, but they are as one before three and yet with the power to be three.

pipe go tooooooooot
hehehe

>>16065061
also, the main reason why I got into neoplatonism was because the uncertainty principle and standard quantum mechanics (fuck many worlds hypothesis), that something is completly itself here and not there, yet that over there is this thing too but the instantiations themeslves are completely and totally only themselves they are only themselves yet the same, and also yet neither but 'they will be'; multiply this by infinity. This is the superposition.

The Foundation of reality, as current science has to appeal, is wrought with paradox and reifications of the Aether, (quantum field), aka neo-monism. Incoherence is the heart of the world.
But monism, like absolute claims of either/or, absolutist platitudes
>that man is i and i am that man
from >>16065007
>>>>/lit/thread/S14042894#p14043482
It is incoherent, or rather incomplete, it isn't wrong, merely halved.

It is my son who shall live,
he whom I begot in my identity,
for he has learned how to enliven the one in the egg, in the respective womb.
as mankind, that emerged from my eye
(the eye) that I sent forth when I was alone
with the Waters, in inertness,
not finding a place in which I could stand or sit,
before Heliopolis had been founded, in which I could exist;
before the Lotus had been tied together, on which I could sit
before I had made Nut so she could be over my head and Geb could
marry her;
before the first Corps was born,
before the two original Enneads had developed and started existing with me."
Then said Atum to the Waters:
"I am floating, very weary,
the natives inert.
It is my son Life, who lifts up my heart, that will enliven my heart
when he has drawn together these very weary limbs of mine."

Loneliness is evil, if the One is Love transcendently, and love is need... and the One as the Good is all meaning and beauty and all lovely things, the object of every desire... then through otherness and difference, and ultimately strife there is the capacity for love, and God has never willed to the lonely nothingness of absolute monism, therefore he is alone and we suspend ourselves away from her. Loneliness-Monad, Curiosity-Indefinity, and Selflessness-Harmony.
The One is self-sufficient because he eternally Emanates, he doesn't emanate because he's self-sufficient.

>>16036670 I'm answering a question.

§3.8.10. What indeed is it? {The One} It is the productive power of all things.44
If it did not exist, neither would all things, nor would Intellect be the primary total Life. And that which is beyond Life is cause of Life.45 For the activity of life which is all things is not primary, but is poured forth as though from a spring. Think of a spring which has no other source, but gives all of itself to rivers while not exhausting itself in the rivers but quietly remaining itself, while the streams which go forth from it are still all together before they flow their separate ways, yet at this point they already each know as individual rivers in what direction they will release their waters; or of life in a huge plant passing through its entirety while the source remains as though seated in the root and is not scattered around it all. So, this source presents life in its total multiplicity to the plant, but itself remains non-many. And this is no great wonder. The wonder is, rather, how the multiplicity of life has come from wha tis not a multiplicity and how the multiplicity would not exist unless what preceded the multiplicity was a thing that was not a multiplicity. For the source is not divided into the whole, since if it had been so divided it would have destroyed the whole as well; nor would the whole continue to exist if the source did not continue to remain in itself and different.46 For this reason, in all cases [of multiplicity], the ascent is to a one. And there is some one in each case to which you will trace it back; and this whole you will trace back to a one before it, not an absolute one, until you come to the absolute One; and this no longer [goes back] to another one.
But if you take the one of the plant, and this is also its source which remains, the one of a living being,the one of the soul, and the one of the universe, you take in each case the most powerful and valued thing. But if you take the One belonging to true Beings, their ‘principle and source’47 and power, are we to lose faith and suppose it to be nothing?
In fact, it is none48 of the things whose source it is, yet is the sort of thing which, because nothing can be predicated of it, not Existence, not Substantiality, not Life, is a thing beyond them. And if you grasp it after removing Existence from it, you will be amazed. Cast yourself towards it and encounter it taking rest within it; unite your thought with it more and more by knowing it through immediate contact with it and by beholding its greatness through what comes after it and is caused by it.

It is our task as founders, then, to compel the best natures to reach the study we said before is the most important, namely, to make the ascent and see the good. But when they’ve made it and looked sufficiently, we mustn’t allow them to do what they’re allowed to do today.
What’s that?
To stay there and refuse to go down again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less worth or of greater.
Then are we to do them an injustice by making them live a worse life when they could live a better one?
You are forgetting again that it isn’t the law’s concern to make any one e class in the city outstandingly happy but to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens into harmony with each other through persuasion or compulsion and by making them share with each other the benefits that each class can confer on the community. The law produces such people in the city, not in order to allow them to turn in whatever direction they want, but to make use of them to bind the city together.
That’s true, I had forgotten.

Iliad and Odyssey
Anthology of Classical Myth
Early Greek Philosophy by Jonathan Barnes
Euthydemus, Protagoras, Alcibiades.
Theages, Charmides, Laches, Lysis
Hippias major, Hippias minor, Ion
Meno, Euthyphro, Clitophon, Apology.
>If you're completely unfamiliar: Elias and David: Introductions to Philosophy with Olympiodorus: Introduction to Logic
>Porphyry's Isagoge
Minos, Laws, Epinomis, Letters (yes, deal with it, read the fucking Laws first among the big brain dialogues)
Aristotle's Categories
Aristotle's Physics
Cratylus, Theætetus, Sophist, Statesman
Aristotle's Metaphysics
Symposium, Phædrus, Gorgias
Philebus, Crito, Phaedo (yes, you shuld read Phaedo this late)
Proclus - Elements of Theology (at least the first two dozen propositions)
Parmenides
Republic, Timæus, Critias
Aristotle's De Anima
>Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism (should awaken a bonus interest in Assyrian/Chaldean religion)
Next level:
Aristotle and Other Platonists
Ancient Epistemology (Key Themes in Ancient Philosophy)
From Plato to Platonism
The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia
The Stoics Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Hackett Classics)
Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy
Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation
The Plotinus Reader
Iamblichus' De Mysteriis
Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many; VS: The Search for God in Ancient Egypt Revised
(you have to read both)
then
Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth

Then the last true philosopher:
Damascius' Problems and solutions Concerning First Principles (or wait for his never-ever Parmenides commentary, is it it too dangerous? why isn't it being translated?)
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite The Complete Works
These two are possibly the same person, or the latter was at least written under the tutelage of Damascius in the early sixth century, released into the world after the exile of the Philosophers into Syria, as a last ditch effort to save the ancient lore within Christianity itself.

If you can afford it, or find it, and still call yourself basic bitch christian after all of this:
Eriugena's Periphyseon, (unabridged, the abridged is cheap and easy).
I only found it on the site from the sticky.
And: Maximus the Confessors Ambigua, plus: Questions Addressed to Thalassius (also in sicky)
While Jay Dyer harps against Neoplatonism (which all his knowledge about it comes from Gerson's self admittedly outdated Cambridge Handbook of Plotinus), his beloved Maximus is "neoplatonic" through and through. Just exchange every occurrence of "jesus/logos" with Dionysius and there you go. Almost identical.

>>15720906
*we have these
not "wee have the see"
>>15720872
because hierarchy is good, defection only comes to be from the free soul's misuse of all things. or themselves, the lowest (matter) is good if we do not try to make it into something more than it is; or even less than it is (like calling it evil in itself), like most moksha seekers or gnostics do.
Without hierarchies there is no life, no growth, no progress, no change, no struggle to overcome, no meaning to find, no beauty to behold.

>>15369160
>>15369171
succēdō (present infinitive succēdere, perfect active successī, supine successum); third conjugation

I climb, mount or ascend
I advance
I follow
I succeed in
I enter

One moment of true joy is worth a thousand moments of anguish: the opposite of what schoop thinks citing Petrarch: “A thousand pleasures do not compensate for one pain”). The experience of the rising sun on a warm and clear summer night, in your young a foolish years with a beautiful woman. This bliss is worth the entire history of the world's suffering, all of time and starry heaven is fulfilled by a single of such nights. In fact, it is because such a moment, a real one, is so "rare" that its glory surpasses an entire life. And the tragedy of those who've never had it, such as schoppy, this too is beautiful; true sacred beauty is only found in the darkest and brightest moments of time. And I am sorry that it had to be you who plays this sorrowful part; but all souls will and have experience both, this age was just not yours.

https://youtu.be/TxIzAnRdXO0

>>15024572
The day following tonight is dedicated to my service, by an eternal religion. After the tempests of the sea have ceased, my priests and ministers customarily offer in my name a new ship as a first fruit of my navigation. I command you not to profane or despise the sacrifice in any way. Tomorrow the High Priest, following in procession under my divine guidance, shall carry a garland of roses next to the timbrel in his right hand. Follow my procession among the people, and when you come to the priest, make as though you would kiss his hand, but instead snatch at the roses. When this is done, I will rid you of the skin and shape of an ass, a kind of beast I have long time abhorred and despised. Above all, beware and do not doubt me or have any fear, even as difficult as it may seem for these events to be brought to pass. Because in the same hour that I have come to you, I have also commanded the Priest a vision of what he shall do, and all the people by my commandment shall be compelled to give you place and to say nothing! Furthermore, do not worry about whether any person shall abhor your ill-favored and deformed figure, as you will be among so fair and joyful ceremonies and in such good company that this will not be cause for concern. Nor would anyone in attendance be so foolhardy as to blame and reprove your sudden restoration to human shape, lest in doing so they should gather or conceive any sinister opinion. Also know this for sure: that the rest of your life until the hour of death shall be bound and subject to me!

>>14941917
i've never read emerson
the rainbow analogy is in both Plotinus and Damascius, and probably in Proclus too somehwhere.

If, therefore, we also get off the track of that truth as we attempt to chart the intelligible abyss, to see how great and what its nature is, and we are carried toward the lower and divided realities, as we are by necessity dragged along with or dragged down by our own meager nothingness, nevertheless it is necessary to endure missing and drifting from the goal. Otherwise, it is not possible, in our present state, to have any conception concerning these things, and we must be content even if only with a far-off and obscure glance or glimpse or trace suddenly flashing before our eyes, however small and not very luminous, but nevertheless a signpost for us that is an analogue of that superluminous and vast nature. But this much we can accept in our discourse, that it castigates itself and agrees that it is not capable of looking at that unified and intelligible light.
Therefore, we speak of the triad in that realm, in the sense that it signifies an undifferentiated multiplicity, and again the dyad signifies the cause of that multiplicity, and the monad is related to these as the One itself, as that which is beyond this very multiplicity. And this is the celebrated intelligible triad, which, wishing to explain by means of different configurations, we are unaware that we render it more complex in our accounts, and especially when we make it an ennead, reckoning it as the complete leader of all things from the first until the lowest,
>observing it as if in a mirror, and seeing it in the third, since it is by nature trimorph, and seeing the triadic principles before it that appear to illuminate brilliantly its three ubiquitous forms, as if in a cloud that has three reflecting surfaces, the single color of the sun appears as an apparently polychrome rainbow. And so also Socrates in the Philebus was unable to gaze in the face of that One, and clarified its nature by means of the triad stationed at its threshold, as he says, because he caught a glimpse of that triad quivering with the single ray of the henad, in a completely unified vision.

Philebus 65a: let us run it down with three—beauty, proportion, and truth, and let us say that these, considered as one, may more properly than all other components of the mixture be regarded as the cause, and that through the goodness of these the mixture itself has been made good.

>>14931113
>Suppose, now, that we leave the further discussion of these matters as evident, and consider again upon the hypothesis that the one is, whether opposite of all this is or is not equally true of the others.
By all means.
>Then let us begin again, and ask, If one is, what must be the affections of the others?
Let us ask that question.
>Must not the one be distinct from the others, and the others from the one?
Why so?
>Why, because there is nothing else beside them which is distinct from both of them; for the expression 'one and the others' includes all things.
Yes, all things.
>Then we cannot suppose that there is anything different from them in which both the one and the others might exist?
There is nothing.
>Then the one and the others are never in the same?
True.
>Then they are separated from each other?
Yes.
>And we surely cannot say that what is truly one has parts?
Impossible.
>Then the one will not be in the others as a whole, nor as part, if it be separated from the others, and has no parts?
Impossible.
>Then there is no way in which the others can partake of the one, if they do not partake either in whole or in part?
It would seem not.
>Then there is no way in which the others are one, or have in themselves any unity?
There is not.
>Nor are the others many; for if they were many, each part of them would be a part of the whole; but now the others, not partaking in any way of the one, are neither one nor many, nor whole, nor part.
True.
>Then the others neither are nor contain two or three, if entirely deprived of the one?
True.
>Then the others are neither like nor unlike the one, nor is likeness and unlikeness in them; for if they were like and unlike, or had in them likeness and unlikeness, they would have two natures in them opposite to one another.
That is clear.
>But for that which partakes of nothing to partake of two things was held by us to be impossible?
Impossible.
>Then the others are neither like nor unlike nor both, for if they were like or unlike they would partake of one of those two natures, which would be one thing, and if they were both they would partake of opposites which would be two things, and this has been shown to be impossible.
True.
>Therefore they are neither the same, nor other, nor in motion, nor at rest, nor in a state of becoming, nor of being destroyed, nor greater, nor less, nor equal, nor have they experienced anything else of the sort; for, if they are capable of experiencing any such affection, they will participate in one and two and three, and odd and even, and in these, as has been proved, they do not participate, seeing that they are altogether and in every way devoid of the one.
Very true.
>>>Therefore if one is, the one is all things, and also nothing, both in relation to itself and to other things.
Certainly.

>>14915448
read the first chapter of Penrose' "Road to Reality"
Mr. I Fucking Love "Science"